As the Christian Easter has its roots in the Jewish Passover, it’s not surprising that the two festivals often coincide. This year, for example, the start of the week-long Jewish holiday was celebrated on Good Friday. These significant events in the calendars of the two religions reflect much of what they have in common and also what separates them.

There was a time when only the differences were stressed, often violently. Thus in many countries Jews tried to keep as low a profile as possible during the Easter period because of the hostile readings and sermons their Christian neighbours heard in church.

They’d blame the Jews for the death of Jesus, choosing to disregard that it was the Romans who crucified him and ignoring the theology that presupposes his death. The excuse to harass Jews was apparently too much of a temptation for some.

Mercifully, nowadays the stress is on what unites us rather than what divides us. A most impressive recent example is The Jewish Annotated New Testament that has just been published by Oxford University Press. Its two editors are distinguished professors of Jewish studies and the many contributors represent the best in contemporary Jewish New Testament scholarship.

It’s a very important book not only because of its fascinating content but also because of its lofty dual purpose: to help Christians understand how Jews read Christian scriptures and help Jews appreciate the grandeur and the power of the New Testament. That’s why the book will become a very important tool in the sacred enterprise of interfaith understanding that goes beyond superficial civility and touches the very essence of coexistence of believers.

The book is yet another document that implicitly distinguishes between the faith of Jesus, which is rooted in Judaism, and the faith about Jesus, which has become Christianity. Christians who recognize the faith of Jesus will understand both Judaism and themselves better. Jews who study the faith about Jesus will come to appreciate the power and the strength of Christianity.

At their best, both Christianity and Judaism seek to affirm that absolute truth belongs to God alone. Each may claim only fragments of it. By sharing our insights and learning from each other we enrich our own faith by coming closer to God’s truth and to a greater commitment to our own tradition.

This is liberal religion at its best. Unfortunately, there are women and men who believe that they and they alone have the franchise on the whole truth. Therefore, every alternative or deviation is for them a lie to be fought. They confuse truth with certainty and try to impress upon us that because they’re so adamant, they must be sincere and right.

Opponents call such people fundamentalists. They themselves usually regard the description as evidence of their consistency, piety and veracity. For obvious reasons, they have no interest in interfaith encounters and will do all they can to distort and invalidate cooperation between religions.

The late Krister Stendahl, a famous Swedish bishop and for many years dean of Harvard Divinity School, formulated three rules of religious understanding that seem to have guided the editors of The Jewish Annotated New Testament:

• When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.

• Don’t compare your best with their worst.

• Leave room for “holy envy,” i.e., recognize elements in other religious traditions that you admire and wish that, in some way, they could be reflected in your own.

I can think of no better way of turning the proximity of Easter and Passover into a motivation to celebrate these principles all year round.

Dow Marmur is rabbi emeritus at Toronto's Holy Blossom Temple. His column appears every other week.

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